Category Archives: OASIS

Following on from the recent blog on the behind-the-scenes work with vocabularies and migration, here’s a short overview of our work on developing the form itself…

One of the most important features of the new OASIS system will be a much enhanced system for logging in. This sounds incredibly straightforward, everyone is used to a web-based system that asks for a username and password; but behind OASIS is a level of technical complexity to support an increased need for simplicity and flexibility. This sounds somewhat contradictory, but to explain…

In the current system logging in is done as an organisation – all users within this organisation (for example My Archaeological Unit) log on with the same details. But what about where there are lots of people, and what if these people are split between regional offices, and what happens when one person forgets the password? What happens when someone leaves? Do we change the password, or rely on the individual to forget it (admittedly I’m sure everyone has much better things to do than logon and sabotage OASIS records, but the principle remains)?

The solution is to move to a system where every individual has their own logon credentials, but then the real complexity starts as we have to factor an individual moving jobs, having more than one job/role and for these roles to have different administration rights. For example, in a hypothetical situation I may start off working for Anfield Archaeology in a role that involves me creating and editing OASIS records for my projects. Then I move to Goodison Archaeology and take over pre-existing projects: the system needs a process to stop me seeing Anfield records (commercial sensitivity etc), but to have access to Goodison records. Whilst in my new job I do some work with Spellow Archaeological Society and offer to help them fill in some archaeological records, as an experienced OASIS user I volunteer to set up this group in the system and become an admin user, but at a later data want to pass on this responsibility to someone else.

I’ll stop there, but the the myriad of potential roles and responsibilities – and these are things identified by OASIS users in the survey – are enormous. So now we’re no longer just dealing with a log on page, but a full-blown user management system. This is what Jo’s been hard at work on over the Summer. Explaining what she’s done in prose is overly long, so here’s a few screen grabs to demonstrate the main principles. Please remember this is the first draft version of the form, things aren’t set in stone and these grabs should be used for illustrative purposes only.

Slide 1: The new OASIS homepage (login on top right corner of screen)

Slide 2: Presuming I already have an account (I get to registering below), I logon and am met with a landing screen. The top-right corner tells me who I’m logged on as, and which organisation I’m currently “in”. In this example, I’ve set my own fictional unit Tim Evans Archaeology as being my default organisation. I can select an option to look at my personal profile

Slide 3: Here I can change my name, I can also see that I’m a standard user for the organisation (so no admin rights). Further down the screen I can set the frequency of notifications I receive from OASIS.

Slide 4: If I go back to my home-page, I can see that I’m also registered with two other organisations. In this case I want to go to my work with “HERALD Level 1 Test User”.

Slide 5: I’m now “in” the system as this other organisation, I can see which organisation I am by the notification in the top-right corner of the screen. If I look at the organisation profile I can see the list of users registered to this organisation. I can see and edit this section this as I am a registered ADMIN. In this example you can see that the user timevans1878 has registered for my organisation, but their user status is set as PENDING. People asking to join an organisation and see their records have to be vetted by an ADMIN, which in this case can be any of the 3 users with these privileges (note: there can be as many admins as needed).

Slide 6: If I scroll down that a page, I can see some extra functions. At the bottom there’s the option to add some text and a logo for my organisation. This will appear in OASIS (so can be seen by other users), and also be transferred to the ADS Library to accompany my organisations reports. Branding of reports (and the ability to edit logos) was a popular request in the scoping phase and is perfectly understandable; people put a lot of work in getting their reports online, and it’s good to enable them to customise “their” section of the site (for example see Wessex Archaeology in the ADS Library). The other function to flag up is the add person button (highlighted)

Slide 7: If I click this I come to a screen where I can start searching for other registered users, I start typing in for my colleague Julian Richards and I can see that he’s in the system. I select him and can either add him as a Standard or Admin user. Important to remember that I can do this due to already being an ADMIN. I can downgrade my status at any point, although the system will always require 1 ADMIN user.

Slide 8: I can also leave an organisation if I wish, so simply go back to my profile and I can see that I’m still registered with “Tim Evans Archaeology” and “test Katie”, but can leave as long as I’m not the sole admin. You can also see that I can apply to join other organisations.

Slide 9: this all assumes I’m already registered. If I’m new to OASIS I can apply to register instead of logon. In this slide I’ve just been asked to register using my email address. However having done so I’m reminded that tim.evans is already registered as an OASIS user, I then get the usual reminders/reset. This is to try and stop (as much as possible) duplication within the system. An interesting facet of this work is our aim to coordinate OASIS users logon details across all main public facing applications hosted by by the ADS (OASIS, Library, ADS-EASY). Jo has been hard at work wrestling with things such as composite persistence modules (no, me neither) to reach a point where a user just has one set of ‘centralised’ credentials. So, no more logging in/out of different systems.

Slide 10: In this case, let’s pretend I’m a fictional user who has never used OASIS at all. I enter my details as usual. It’s worth reminding readers that for security purposes all passwords are encrypted at the ADS side (we can’t see what they are!). A user will also be asked to read and agree with Terms and Conditions of Use (e.g. “You may not place on this website any material where the rights belong to a person other than yourself without the consent of the owner”), and the Privacy Policy. The latter makes sure you’re aware of what information the ADS does and does not collect, and how it is stored, accessed and re-used.

Slide 11: My fictional user is then asked to which organisation they would like to be a part of. Here, the user wants to be part of Tim Evans Archaeology. They find the group then click to join, as noted earlier their participation will need to be approved by an ADMIN for that group. If my organisation doesn’t exist, I can create my own

Slide 12: So off I go and create my new organisation. The system does check to see if “Steve Puffin Archaeology” already exists to try and stop duplication. Providing it doesn’t, the new account is created and I’m automatically the ADMIN for this group. The world of OASIS is now my oyster.

I’ll stop there! I hope that’s given people a clear overview of just some of the functionality that’s already been built. We’re currently only sharing this pre-alpha build with the project funders, but by Spring 2019 we’ll be circulating the next version of the build for wider testing. We’ve already had several people sign up, so if you are interested in being an early stage tester please do get in touch via herald@ads.ac.uk

As the nights begin to draw in, it seems like an opportune moment to reflect on the progress of the redevelopment of OASIS. The Summer has perhaps been atypical here, usually it’s something of a hiatus between the rushes of finishing things to meet the end of a financial year/going on holiday, and beginning afresh in the Autumn. Not so this Summer, and it seems like myself and Jo have been busier than ever, but what have we been doing?

The first part of this blog is to try to give an overview of the non-technical tasks, I’ll be writing up the development team’s work on the actual form as a second part shortly.

—-

Hopefully readers will have seen the alert for the small user needs Survey in September. This has now closed and the results are being written up to feed back to HE and HES on the resources that will be needed as we move into Stage 3 of the project (the actual roll-out of a real, live system). There was some valuable feedback, particularly on the value many users placed on having a human presence to help with their queries, greater input into training/guidance from people that actually use the form in day-to- day workflows (so not me!), and to ensure support for users in remoter parts of the country. I’ll write a longer blog on the results in the near future.

Elsewhere, we’ve also completed a task to ensure that the new system incorporates the highest standards of recording. As users of the current form are no doubt aware, there have long been problems with ensuring the accuracy and consistency of things being recorded in OASIS (a consequence of the age and original purpose of the form, but that’s another story). During the first stages of the redevelopment project exactly whatis being recorded and howit is being recorded, came under scrutiny. The result is that some fields have been dropped, others merged or rationalised. A full list of what remains can be seen in the Functional Specification which is available on the HERALD project wiki for those that wish to find out more.

Moreover, there’s the challenge of ensuring what goes in these fields is accurate and understood. So at long last we’ll be using the full power of the thesauri hosted at heritagedata to enable users to enter correct terminologies. And yes, they will be country specific where necessary. The form is being built to be flexible enough to have a drop-down for simple lists, but to allow users to enter their own terms and return relevant entries from the thesaurus (see below)

Example 1: User in Scotland enters “barrow” and form submits the string to the web service at heritagedata http://www.heritagedata.org/blog/services/. The service returns an array of records from Monument Type Thesaurus (Scotland)Example 2: form allows user to follow link to online thesaurus entry

For new OASIS we’ve wanted to go further and to try to use wordlists wherever possible. This has led to a mini project to identify areas of the form that could be controlled (so no free text), and then create the list of terms to be used. Since an initial review by FISH back in December 2017, this work has been aided by the teams at HE, HES and Department of Environment for Northern Ireland, especially Zhouyi Qian a placement with HE’s Data Standards Unit. In a short space of time Zhouyi was able to rationalise 16 years worth of entries to OASIS into smaller groups of terms to describe:

The reason for the investigation e.g. <Planning requirement> or <Ecclesiastical Consent >

The broad development type (if related to an event within the planning framework) e.g. <Land management> or <Energy and power generation>

After a review by FISH members, the lists are good to go. As if that wasn’t enough, Zhouyi undertook the almost Herculean task of mapping all entries within the current database to those new concepts. To give an example of the extent of this task, consider the values entered to record the old fields for Prompt and Reason for Investigation (merged into Reason for Investigation). In the old system there were 69,750 values, in 1376 unique combinations such as:

It’s important to note that all the original data will be kept (nothing is being deleted!!!). So for example you’ll be able to see that for example, in the original form a user recorded “Everton Football Club” as the funder but that this has been mapped to the concept of a <Private or public corporation>. We will also be archiving the complete OASIS database in perpetuity.

As well as the new lists we’ve also been mapping and migrating standard relevant parts of the form to the correct entries in the more well-established thesauri (monument, event, object, period). As these have been free-text there is a great deal of variety in what and how things have been entered, but my favourite is the person who for object recorded “WOTSITS PACKET”. This valuable mapping work is allowing us to migrate records from the old to new database, to help populate the new form and so that everyone’s records will appear when they finally get to logon!

Speaking of which, time to move on to part II and show off the new form…

As work on the new OASIS form continues in earnest, we’re looking ahead to the anticipated release of the public beta in March 2020 and thinking about what kinds of support, guidance and reference resources we’ll need to have in place by release. To this end, a very short survey has been created to allow OASIS users to feedback on what they would like to see provided:

This survey is deliberately very simple, and meant to give us a very clear indication of what users want. Answers will be able to be filtered by type of user, country etc so there’s an opportunity for us to identifiy specific tools or resources for specific communities if needed. It should take less than 5 minutes to complete (honestly!), and no personal data is collected.

Please do take the time to fill this in, even if you don’t use the current system. As the new OASIS will be a key component of reporting and information strategies in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, it really does have a broad remit. Use the chance to make it work for you.

In the three months since the last technical report on HERALD Stage 2 (i.e. the build of the new OASIS system), the development team here at the ADS have been working hard. The new database has been built; in a departure from our usual database here at the ADS we’ve decided to use PostgreSQL as our database management system. A whole other blog could (and probably will) be written on why we’ve made this decision, but suffice to say it offers -for our needs – a greater flexibility in terms of datatypes, scale and indexing. Furthermore, via the PostGIS extension it also allows us to store geospatial datatypes, and makes it easy to do many of the location based activities we’ll need to record places simply and efficiently (and a whole lot more besides, but I will save that for another blog).

We’ve also – via consultation with ALGAO members – established a criteria and plan for moving records from the old OASIS database to the new system to ensure that no useful information gets left behind. Part of this work package has also been to map ‘bespoke’ terms used in the old/current model to appropriate UK heritage vocabularies, and in this we’ve received valuable assistance from the FISH Terminology Working Group. This last piece of work has highlighted the need for small revisions to existing lists, and indeed for new lists altogether (e.g. archive component). Over the next couple of months we’ll be finalising these edits and tweaks with FISH, HE and HES, and get ready for a pilot migration of data in the Autumn. As soon as this in finished I’ll report back here, as the level of semantic interoperability built into the new system (including LOD concepts from the BGS and OS) is quite exciting, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Aside from this, Jo has been hard at work building the main application framework (or more simply ‘the new OASIS form’). Having written the Functional Specification and built the old system (back in the early 2000’s), Jo is probably better placed than most to implement the new build! At the moment she’s been working on arguably the hardest part in the logon and registration module…

The first glimpse of the new system: a snaphsot of the working registration module on Jo’s PC

The new system is – hopefully – a significant technical and conceptual upgrade on what we have in the older system. For starters, users will be able to log on as themselves rather than via an organisational account. Users will be able to be associated with more than one organisation to reflect different roles people may have in their work/research capacity, and be able to create a new organisation if theirs is not in the system. Extra steps are built in to ensure as little duplication as possible, including use of other ADS user groups to equate a user/organisation in that system with the same entities in OASIS.

At a slightly higher level, an organisational admin will be able to oversee their group’s members (add and remove), and have the ability to add details about their organisation. The latter will have capacity for Level 2 + 3 users (such as HERs and Museums/Archives) to add reference details on how their organisation is using the system, with space for specific guidance notes for where necessary.

Overall, we’re aiming for a simple yet flexible , quick, and well-explained (i.e. on screen guidance) workflow that reflects the feedback we’ve received on how the majority of users want to use the system. We’ll be showing this and other developments as part of timetabled project milestones to the project funders in the next month, and I’ll be reporting back on other significant developments as often as I can.

Please remember that that the timetable for HERALD Stage 2 is available on this wiki. If you’re interested in becoming a tester for the alpha build then please do get in touch with me via the project email: herald@ads.ac.uk

As training officer for Oasis in England I joined LinkedIn in 2012 & it very quickly became apparent that many potential contacts worked for organisations not then registered on Oasis. Once contacts had been made on LinkedIn I sent a standard email offering free training sessions in Oasis, giving more background to the Online Form & potential lodging of reports in the ADS Library. Many replies were received & training visits made. One memorable trip was made to Long Buckby in Northamptonshire to register Iain Soden Heritage Services on Oasis. Another great advantage of LinkedIn was found to be the notable number of scientific and architectural contacts made. This initiative is ongoing & in the last week some new invites have been sent out. A new discussion group ‘Oasis Forum‘ was also set up on LinkedIn this year.

In late 2017 we were incredibly pleased to hear that the Department of Communities, Historic Environment Division, Northern Ireland, were ready to implement a long-standing ambition to join-up to OASIS. It was felt that OASIS could help realise several goals set as part of their wider look at the management of archaeological archives and licencing of excavations in Northern Ireland. These goals included adding more structure and consistency to data generated during the course of investigations, and integrating this information into existing systems (and obviously, the dissemination of grey literature!).

At the start of 2018 the ground work had been prepared and Jenny embarked on coding a Northern Ireland instance of OASIS. Here’s how she got on…

Adding the Northern Ireland-specific forms to OASIS was a fairly straightforward process as similar had already been created for Scotland and Wales. The linear three-stage process, by which the information was passed from contractor, to local government validation, to national level validation, was also kept the same.

Of the five main areas of the form (Project Details, Project Location, Project Creators, Project Archives and Project Bibliography), three required alterations to the way the form appeared or behaved: Project Details, Project Location, and Project Archives.

Project Details

The form of the project details page remained the same as for the other countries; it was the word lists that needed changing for this section. For most of the controlled lists, such as the ‘Type of project’ or ‘Site status’, the lists were generated by amending current database tables to indicate the terms that were applicable to Northern Ireland. The main alteration was to the Period table, where a new table had to be created that had the period-date relationships for Northern Ireland as well as the slightly different period-date relationships for the other countries.

Project Location

The Project Location section was, as expected, the area of the form that needed the most work. The Northern Irish location options differed from the other countries in that there was a single ‘Local Council’ level location, rather than the ‘County’, ‘District’, ‘Parish’ sub-divisions seen in the English version of the form. A new table was added to the underlying database to hold the location information including a second level to differentiate between ‘Terrestrial’ or ‘Maritime’ projects. In this case, ‘Maritime’ being treated just as another location sub-division, rather than being used to inform multiple Historic Environment Records (HERs), as the Northern Ireland projects would all be validated by the Historic Environment Division, regardless of the area type or Local Council. The option to select the main and additional HERs was therefore removed, with the validating body set at Historic Environment Division for all Northern Irish records.

The ‘Site Coordinates’ aspect of the form also needed to be altered substantially from the other countries, being the only country that does not fall under the OSGB coordinate system. Rather than having multiple options to allow users to enter Lat/Long and/or OSGB coordinates here, the default was set to Latitude and Longitude. The functionality which automatically converts the coordinates from OSGB to Lat/Long upon saving was also completely removed in the Northern Irish forms.

Project Archives

This section required the smallest change, with the field heading ‘Archive recipient’ being changed to ‘Archive location’ in all headings and drop-down list defaults.

Finishing touches

Once the main areas of the form were completed and functioning correctly, the rest of the form needed to be checked for country-specific references, right down to the help text, such as that used for the bibliographic information, these were changed to incorporate Northern Irish examples.

The Northern Ireland additions have now been transferred to the live version of the form and are ready for testing.

It’s been nearly a year since this blog was last updated, and I’ve become aware that many people are interested in what’s happened over that period, and indeed what is happening with the HERALD project overall.

For those blissfully unaware, HERALD is the overarching title for the project that is actively redeveloping the OASIS system. For background, please do have a look at the revitalised HERALD wiki pages.

Well, a great deal has happened! In the first instance there have been significant staffing changes and reshuffles here at the ADS. Over the winter, one of our Developers (Lei Xia) moved on to a fantastic job with University of York IT Services. Lei was one of the key brains behind the new ADS Library, and his last few months were spent finishing the final tasks and processes for that system. With Lei moving on, we’ve looked around for a new Java Developer to take over as a designated ‘OASIS Developer’ to work with our existing Development team. It turns our that despite casting a wide net, the answer was very close to home and in February Jo Gilham (previously the HERALD Project Manager) successfully interviewed for the post.

Those reading this will probably be aware of Jo through the scoping work she did as part of Stage 1, and it was Jo that wrote the final Functional Specification for the new OASIS system that was signed off by HE and HES in July 2017. Not many people know this, but Jo comes from a technical background and in recent years has begun programming in Java, so she’s ideally based to take on this challenge.

Despite this quick turnover, losing an experienced member of staff has not been ideal and has led to a delay in the expected delivery of the project. In truth, this delay has also been exacerbated by the need to finish work on the previously mentioned ADS Library, which has proved to be an extremely large and complex piece of work that has consistently thrown up problems that could not have been predicted at the outset. Significant delay on HERALD has thus been inevitable.

With support from Historic England, we’ve thus gone back to the original plan, identified which pieces of work may require additional resources (one of the positives of the Library was that we learnt alot more about the complexities of particular tasks), and come up with a new time frame for the OASIS redevelopment. I’ve created a project timeline on the HERALD wiki pages for easy reference, but to summarise we are now looking at completion of the Beta format of new OASIS in March 2020. Although that seems a long way off, in terms of development time this is still relatively short, so for the new/old HERALD team it’s full steam ahead.

On a final note, one of the issues that was raised recently was the need for increased communications regarding HERALD, especially in the build up to the public release of the Beta after March 2020. We’ve come up with a broad strategy of ways to accomplish this, of which you’ll see a great deal of in the immediate future, including:

the HERALD wiki pages and this blog will be kept up to date, and act as a constant guide to what’s happening and a reference resource with accessible reports and other publicity materials

you’ll also see me (Tim) out and about as much as possible at conferences, workshops and meetings

production of a great deal of paper-based literature about HERALD

new electronic publicity material which can be reproduced by non-ADS individuals if required

a greater presence on ADS and partner social media

I hope this does not seem like an overkill, or a saturation of the landscape! The desired effect is instead to try and make as many people aware of how the redevelopment is going, how they can participate and feedback on testing and establishing training needs.

The redevelopment of OASIS is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create an excellent resource that plays a core part of Historic England’s HIAS, and a system that will work optimally for everyone involved. The communications side of this work will focus on making the existing community aware of this, and how their specific concerns and issues with the old system are being addressed. It’s also an opportunity to engage those who previously have not used OASIS, or have thought that OASIS is not suitable for their work.

So please, do keep up to date with this blog, and related social media channels such as

https://twitter.com/oasis_data

https://twitter.com/ADS_Update

For those of you who prefer face-to-face chats, please have a look at the upcoming events to see where members of the HERALD team will be in attendance. If you have any questions about the project or require any information that is not available on the main HERALD wiki then please email the team.

Most archaeologists working in Scotland (and the wider UK) will know about OASIS. OASIS is currently undergoing redevelopment and part of that process involves trying to realise a long held ambition to better integrate museums into the process.

As part of ScARF’s Museums Project, ScARF will be hosting a small workshop to try and bring together those working in Scotland with OASIS (especially those in a *museums/archives* and archaeology setting) to learn more about OASIS and plans for its development.

The workshop will now be held on the 26th June 2017 from 11.30am in the conference room of the National Museums Scotland. Attendance is free and will be on a first come, first served basis as places are limited.

Jo Gilham (HERALD Project Manager) at the Archaeology Data Service and Peter McKeague (Spatial Information Manager, Historic Environment Scotland) will be on hand to answer questions and to let those who will be (or could be) using HERALD know more about how the redevelopment might affect their work. Paula Milburn (Discovery and Excavation Scotland editor) will also be on hand to answer questions and provide a Scottish perspective.

If you work with OASIS at the moment or are involved with the deposition of archaeological archives in Scotland and want to know more, then this is the workshop for you! We especially encourage those working in museums and archaeology who might use OASIS to come along.

If you wish to apply for a place at this workshop, or to find out more, then please email emma@socantscot.org as soon as possible.

Most archaeologists working in Scotland (and the wider UK) will know about OASIS. OASIS is currently undergoing redevelopment and part of that process involves trying to realise a long held ambition to better integrate museums into the process.

As part of ScARF’s Museums Project, ScARF will be hosting a small workshop to try and bring together those working in Scotland with OASIS (especially those in a *museums* and archaeology setting) to learn more about OASIS and plans for its development.

The workshop will be held in the conference room of the National Museums Scotland on the 12th May 2017 from 11am. Attendance is free and will be on a first come, first served basis as places are limited.

Jo Gilham (HERALD Project Manager) at the Archaeology Data Service and Peter McKeague (Spatial Information Manager, Historic Environment Scotland) will be on hand to answer questions and to let those who will be (or could be) using HERALD know more about how the redevelopment might affect their work. Paula Milburn (Discovery and Excavation Scotland editor) will also be on hand to answer questions and provide a Scottish perspective.

If you work with OASIS at the moment or are involved with the deposition of archaeological archives in Scotland and want to know more, then this is the workshop for you! We especially encourage those working in museums and archaeology who might use OASIS to come along.

If you wish to apply for a place at this workshop, or to find out more, then please email emma@socantscot.org as soon as possible.

On the 6th May 2015 and again on 7th March 2016 group training days in OASIS were provided for archaeological societies working within Cambridgeshire as part of the HLF funded Jigsaw initiative.

Attending the 2015 session were representatives from

the Covington History Group

the Cambridge Archaeology Field Group

the Warboys Archaeology Project

the Fen Edge Archaeology Group

Together they disproved the belief that local societies are not up to date with the online side of archaeology as they had with them the software tools needed to overcome problems with the training room passwords at Shire Hall!

In 2016 the attendees were from:

Access Cambridge Archaeology

the Cambridge Archaeology Field Group

the Fen Edge Archaeology Group

the Sawtry Society

Both sessions were really enjoyable thanks largely to the fact that several diverse groups all got on together & shared questions and solutions springing from their first Oasis Forms. Recently the FEAG form for the Twenty Pence Project Excavations 2011–2015 in Cottenham was signed off & completed and is a fine reminder of the value of the two Jigsaw Days.

The report from Fen Edge Archaeology Group

It is still hoped that the Cambridgeshire Jigsaw experience can be spread to other counties.

Although not part of the Jigsaw initiative, the Community Archaeology reports produced by Access Cambridge Archaeology have started to appear in the ADS Library and demonstrate the growing number of Community projects being entered onto Oasis.